Gates, Holder subpoenaed

The leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subpoenaed Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday provide more information about the events leading up to the Ft. Hood shooting.

Last week, Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ranking Republican Susan Collins of Maine said the administration has for months stymied their attempts to fully investigate the gaps that may have enabled the murder of 13 people at the Texas Army base on Nov. 5.

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The two senators have been trying, unsuccessfully, to gain access to the personnel file of the alleged shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, and to witnesses and documents showing his communications with an extremist Muslim cleric in Yemen.

Specifically, the senators are seeking access to Hasan’s personnel file, the “For Official Use Only” supplement to the report on the Ft. Hood shooting by retired Adm. Vernon Clark and former Army Secretary Togo West, documents providing names of government personnel who worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force before in the year before the shooting and documents from witnesses who aided the report by Clark and West.

“Although both DOD and FBI have provided hundreds of pages of documents, much of that has been publicly available and, more important, the departments have withheld the key witnesses and documents that will shed light on the FBI’s and DoD’s aborted investigation of Major Hasan before the attack and his conduct while at Walter Reed Army Medical Center,” the senators said in a letter to Gates that accompanied the subpoena.

The Defense Department, he said, believes that it has responded to requests from Congress, “in keeping with the need to protect the integrity of the criminal prosecution and longstanding privacy practice.”

“We will continue to cooperate with the committee in every way, with that caveat, that single caveat, that whatever we provide does not impact upon our ability to prosecute,” he said, echoing comments made by Gates last week.

Senior defense officials with legal expertise acknowledged that the Pentagon has been cautious with providing information, but said they have already given numerous briefings and documents to the committee.

They acknowledged, though, that the committee has been denied access to Hasan’s personnel files, but stressed that members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over nominations and other personnel issues, can view the files. Both Lieberman and Collins are members of that committee, too.

Firing back, Leslie Phillips, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Committee, said “the jurisdictional excuse is specious and is not relevant to a congressional investigation.”

The Homeland Security Committee has frequently reviewed documents that fell into other committees’ domains on other investigations, she said. And to suggest that the two senators, as members of Armed Services Committee, “had access to the documents they are now seeking as chairman and ranking member of a separate committee, is naïve, if not insulting.”